How to Navigate Through The DisplayIt!Xpress Console

Transcription

Welcome to this tutorial of DisplayIt!Xpress from Best Wave. In the next few minutes, we'll show you how anyone can manage one or more digital signs in our office or around the world. We've preloaded a copy of DisplayIt!Xpress media player software on a small form factor Windows PC that's in our lobby and connected to a large screen display. We start it up and enter our email address for registration. 

Since we haven't defined any content yet, what we see is a blue sky image with the Best Wave logo. We'll use the free Management Console to load content now. The Management Console is set up for easy 1, 2, 3 operation. We define the displays, we select the content we want playing on each one, and then we update them and monitor their status. 

Let's begin by adding a new display. We click the Find button. It searches our network for devices with DisplayIt!Xpress running. When it locates one, it'll type almost everything in for us. I'm going to change the name of the display to main lobby. I'll put in the user ID and password that I defined when I installed the player software and enter 10 seconds for how long I want new content items to play. 

Now, I'm clicking the Transition Effects button, so images transition nicely. By clicking on the Display name, I can see a screenshot with time and date stamp from the actual display. Now, let's go to the Manage Content tab. We'll select the Display from the pop up. Now, we can simply drag and drop content right onto the Management Console to add it to our playlist. 

As you can see, we added some tropical islands images and some food images to this displays playlist. We can click on any item in the playlist and move it up or down in the sequence using these buttons or the up and down keys on our keyboard. We can change the duration of any item by highlighting it and typing in a different number of seconds in this case, eight. 

If we want all of the items in the playlist to play for eight seconds, we can click the Apply To All button. Next, I'm highlighting the breakfast promotional items. I can hold down the control key as I click each one or the Shift key to select multiple entries at once. I want to set the start and end time for the breakfast items using the pop ups here. 

Now, we're selecting the three lunch items. And setting their start and end times to 10:00 AM through 2:00 PM. Now, let's set the dates that the Thanksgiving picture will appear. We highlight it and choose a starting date, and then an ending date. Finally, let's have some of the tropical islands images appear on weekdays and others only on weekends. You don't have to save changes. Every change you make is saved automatically. 

Let's go to the Monitor and Update tab. We click on the status indicator and it turns green. That means our content has been updated. We see island images just as we expect, but not the breakfast, lunch, or Thanksgiving items because of the way we scheduled them. 

Now, let's go back to the Manage Content tab and try a few more content types. We can highlight any item and remove it by clicking the Remove button to remove all of the items in our playlist, click the Remove All button. 

One of the most popular content types is PowerPoint. Before we add a PowerPoint file, I want to show you some important settings to make your PowerPoints work well with DisplayIt!Xpress. First, in the Slideshow tab under Setup Slideshow, click Browse at a Kiosk. This makes the PowerPoint play full screen and loop continuously. 

Next, under the Design tab slide, show, size, we have selected a 16 by 9 aspect ratio that matches up to our display. So we don't get black bars at the left and right of the screen. If you want a high Res presentation, you can use a custom size here. 22.66 inches by 15 inches is full resolution on a 1080p display. 

Now, under the Transitions tab, we click the Fade transition so our slides will fade from one to the next. You can choose any transition you want. Since PowerPoint player is used, all transitions and animations in PowerPoint are supported. We click the Advance Automatically box and put in a time for each slide. I will set it to 6 seconds. Click on Apply To All that way, we know that all of our slides have a time to go to the next slide automatically. 

Last, if you're using any fonts that are not typical, you need to embed them in the presentation. Otherwise, if they're not in the player or computer, a plain font will be substituted. To do this, go to the File menu and click Options. Then select Save, and finally click the Embed fonts in file button. I'm going to save this presentation, and then we'll put it in the playlist. 

We drag and drop the PowerPoint to add it to our playlist. Just like any other content, it is automatically set to play for a default duration of 10 seconds. But that isn't the actual duration of the PowerPoint. To find out what that is, click on the get duration button right here. 

We see that this simple two slide PowerPoint has a duration of 12 seconds. That's how long it will take to play one time through. Of course, we can set it to a multiple of that like 24 seconds to play twice. If this is the only item in our playlist, we can set the duration to a big number. The largest possible is 86,400 seconds, which is 24 hours. By setting it this way, the PowerPoint will loop continuously for 24 hours before PowerPoint takes a second to restart. So it plays uninterrupted. 

Once again, we go to the Monitor and Update tab and click on the yellow status bar. It turns green and our content updates. There's our PowerPoint playing just as we thought. We can actually see what's playing on any display right from the Management Console. 

Let's go to the Add Edit Displays tab now we'll click on the name of any display. We see a screenshot that was taken within the last minute. We can also click on the View Logs button. In Excel, we'll select the first four columns and double click to widen the view. Then we'll scroll down to the very bottom that will show us our latest entries in the log. 

As you can see, we were playing our tropical islands and then we sent a content update. DisplayIt!Xpress checks the files to make sure they're OK, and then begins playing them. In the next column over, it shows us the duration of each content item. Since we're here, let's take a look at a few of the options available with DisplayIt!Xpress media players. 

First of all, you can select Windows or Android players. There are four updating methods for Windows-based players. We're using the LAN option. We could also use Shared Folders across the network cloud updating using Google Drive or a USB drive that we carry from the Management Console to the player. 

Android players can pull their content from a web service. For Windows players, we have options like setting transitions on or off. Remember to save any changes that you make in this area. As I have been hovering the mouse, you've probably noticed the tooltips popping up on the screen. Every interface element in the Management Console has a tooltip. You can set tooltips to on, off, or delayed using the Settings screen. We'll talk more about that later. 

Let's go back to the Manage content tab and take a look at the widgets. There are four widgets available in DisplayIt!Xpress clock, calendar, weather, and scrolling text. The clock has two options, digital and analog. 

For the digital clock, you can select its color. And if you want the date to appear on the face of the clock. The analog clock allows you to place your logo right on the face. The weather widget allows you to choose the color and weather from the United States, Canada, or other countries. 

There are over 8,600 airport locations throughout the world included for no additional charge. In this case, we'll select the state of Arizona, Phoenix, Sky Harbor Airport, and our local airport, Scottsdale. We'll also select an airport in California, in this case, Los Angeles International. You can have up to five weather locations and it will rotate between them. The calendar widget has one option. You may select the color. 

Now let's add some scrolling text. Scrolling text can appear at the top or the bottom of the screen. Simply start typing into the text box to add your text. Now, we'll use the Insert Date and Insert Time buttons to put in the date and time on the next line. 

We need to format it a little bit to get everything neatly on one line of text. And then we're going to use the Add File button to add a text file that contains a newsfeed. We happen to be using the AP top stories news feed, but just about any RSS feed will work. Now, we'll go to Monitor and Update and send these changes to the display. 

Let's go back to Manage Content again and we'll take a look at how the widgets are positioned on the screen. As you can see here, small icons depict each of the widgets. You can simply drag them from target to target to reposition them on the screen. 

Rather than have the widgets floating on top of your content, the Panels option allows you to set up a panel on the left or the right with the text on the top or the bottom of the screen and places all of your widgets on the panel. Let's take a look at how that appears on screen now. 

To change the settings for the individual widgets, you can simply use the same controls you were using before. For example, here we're changing the clock from analog to digital. And then we're turning the calendar off so that area of the panel will be blank. Panels give us an incredible amount of flexibility. 

We can choose the background from one of over 60 colors and textures. We can also include a logo. This should be a PNG file. Just like the text widget, we can select the font, color, and style of our text. Repeating this process with a different logo, background, and font color, we can have a totally different look in just a couple of minutes. 

DisplayIt!Xpress is very flexible in terms of content types. Adding them to a playlist is the same as image and PowerPoint. We open up the Windows file system, drag and drop some files in, and now we have a digital video, a flash movie, a PDF file, and an Excel spreadsheet. You'll notice that the digital video did not have a duration. Videos always play for the length of the movie. 

By clicking the Add Web Page button and typing in a URL, we can add any web page to our playlist. Once again, we click on Monitor and Update and click on the Status box. Our display is updated and let's take a look at the new content. There's our digital video and our Excel spreadsheet, actually a chart followed by a web page. 

Now, this is no ordinary web page. Best Wave created some software for Liberty Wildlife here in Phoenix, Arizona. It extracts the data from their solar panels every minute and reformats the web page to reflect current data. 

The next item in our playlist is an interactive flash movie. The buttons on the bottom of this movie are sensitive to touch. You can navigate using them. You can also do interactivity with PowerPoint. Best Wave offers a class in PowerPoint for digital signage, and this is one of the techniques that we teach. 

Remember the playlist we created early in this tutorial. It took us some time to specify the times and dates that we wanted certain playlist items to play. Once we were done, what if we wanted to use that same playlist on another display? Or what if we wanted to bring it back in the future? 

There's an easy way to do that. We simply click on the Save Playlist button, and type in a name. Any time we want to recall that same playlist, we just select it by clicking the Playlist Folder here. Saved playlists include all the widget and panel settings as well, so you can bring back everything that you had specified in the playlist before. 

In this example, we've saved a playlist called Fire Alarm with messages in two languages and text that scrolls across the screen in bright yellow letters on a red background. All of that was saved and can be quickly recalled by using this function. We're just about finished with this tutorial, but first, I'd like to point out a few interface elements that may come in handy. 

First of all, the preview window. You can right click this icon to switch from landscape to portrait mode and back. The preview window gives you a pretty good representation of what your digital sign will look like. Not all content types are visible in the preview window. This depends on the software that's installed on the Management Console computer. 

Next, we'll click on the DX icon in the top left corner, which is actually a pop up menu. I find the most useful item here the software update selection, which brings this copy of the Management Console to the latest revision. There are three icons in the top right corner. 

The information icon shows a revision history for both the player and Management Console software. The book icon opens the user guide as a PDF. The sprocket icon takes us to the settings page. The first group of radio buttons controls how quickly tooltips appear on the screen after you hover over an interface element. 

In this tutorial, we used manual updating where we click the status indicator to send content to a display. That's what most people do. DisplayIt!Xpress also has an automatic mode that will check the connectivity of each display every minute. If you use this, make sure to enter an email address so the software can let you know if a display is not connecting. 

If more than one person is going to be controlling your displays, it's important to set the content folder path to a shared network drive. Do this immediately after installing the Management Console on each computer. 

The Management Console has interfaces in seven different languages. The correct language is selected automatically at startup. If this does not happen, you can use these buttons to select the language you prefer. If you are using FTP pull updating for your Android players, you will use the Next button to select the server's root folder. 

That concludes this tutorial of DisplayIt!Xpress. At Best Wave, we're always interested in hearing your comments and feedback. Let us know how we can improve to meet all of your digital signage needs. Thank you for watching.